French Holocaust denier jailed for denying Nazi gas chambers, saying Jews spread disease
Vincent Reynouard, who has been convicted 10 times for similar offenses, sentenced to 8 months and ordered to pay damages to Jewish groups
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A Paris court on Tuesday jailed a prominent French Holocaust denier for eight months for making the false claim that Nazi gas chambers did not exist during World War II, and for referring to Jewish people as “pathogenic.”
Holocaust denial has been a criminal offense in France since 1990.
Vincent Reynouard, already convicted 10 times since 2006, mainly for denying crimes against humanity, was charged over articles that appeared in a far-right magazine in 2024 and 2025.
Writing for Rivarol magazine, Reynouard, 57, described the gas chambers in Nazi concentration camps as “Soviet propaganda” and “made-up stories.”
He also argued that “large gas chambers for a thousand people” were a “technical impossibility.”
“By denying the existence of the gas chambers, a symbol of the extermination of the Jews regardless of their size or capacity, the defendant is denying the existence of the Holocaust through the questioning of one of its principal methods,” the court said in its ruling, which was seen by AFP.
Reynouard was also convicted of antisemitic insult for describing Jewish people as “pathogenic.”
“He thus reduces Jewish people to a germ that is a source of infection,” the judges said.
Rivarol’s editor, Jerome Bourbon, whose criminal record contains 22 convictions, was sentenced to six months in prison, to be served under electronic monitoring at home.
The two men were also ordered to jointly pay damages to several groups, including the Jewish Observatory of France and the League Against Racism and Antisemitism.
Reynouard has been convicted on numerous other occasions stretching back to 1991, when he was convicted as a student for distributing revisionist literature.
In 2001, he was suspended as a school math teacher for printing and distributing Holocaust-denying pamphlets and assigning homework involving counting concentration camp victims. Police in Scotland said they arrested Reynouard in 2022 in Fife, north of Edinburgh, on behalf of French authorities.
He had been living in a fishing village under a false identity. Reynouard had been convicted in absentia for offenses including internet videos in which he denied Nazi crimes.
The Times of Israel Community.